Artificial respiration of patients is necessary for various medical applications, e.g., during surgery. Breathing apparatuses without rebreathing are used for the artificial respiration of patients in intensive care units of hospitals. The expired gas breathed out by the patient is reused as inspiration gas in anesthesia apparatuses, i.e., this is a rebreathing system with breathing air circulation. A gas delivery means, which sends the breathing air to the patient during inspiration, is present in the breathing air circulation system in the anesthesia apparatus. The gas delivery means is either switched off or is being operated with a very low output only during and after expiration.
A self-test is to be performed in breathing or anesthesia apparatuses before the beginning of use of the apparatus. Reliable function of the breathing or anesthesia apparatus shall be guaranteed hereby. Such a self-test requires an overall duration of 8 minutes, which leads to an increased burden in terms of time for the staff performing this task. An essentially shorter pretest, during which only the essential components of the breathing or anesthesia apparatus are tested is performed for this reason before the self-test proper. As a result, obvious errors shall be recognized early on rather than being displayed only after the more prolonged self-test. Obvious errors can be recognized by the user during the pretest and subsequently corrected.
Outside the operating times of the breathing or anesthesia apparatus, the apparatus is put into a so-called standby mode. Only certain functions of the apparatus, e.g., a monitor of an input unit, are temporarily deactivated in the standby mode, but the breathing or anesthesia apparatus can be briefly set again into full operating functionality. A processor or a computing unit of the control unit is switched on during the standby mode, and a heating means of the breathing or anesthesia apparatus is also switched on during the standby mode, so that the power consumption may definitely be 70 W in the standby mode. Thus, the breathing or anesthesia apparatus has a high electric power consumption during the standby mode outside the operating times of the breathing or anesthesia apparatus, e.g., during the night, and the breathing or anesthesia apparatus disadvantageously has a high energy consumption as a result.
US 2008//0147136 A1 shows a process and a device for the automatic self-test of medical devices. It is detected with this process whether the medical device has reached the time for an automatic self-test when the medical device is in a switched-off state. If the result that is detected is positive, an automatic self-test is performed.